Art In Action

In 1939, the Golden Gate International Exposition opened on Treasure
Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. It provided thousands
of visitors with new glimpses of the world; past, present and future.
Thousands of cars drove over the newly opened San Francisco-Oakland
Bay Bridge and parked on the flat man-made outskirts of Treasure
Island. Fairgoers were treated to hundreds of exhibits from across the
country and around the world.

One special exhibit, called
Art in Action (June 1 - September 29, 1940) was designed so that the
public could watch artists in the process of creating their paintings,
sculptures, and frescoes. Timothy Pflueger, a well-known San Francisco
architect and one of the organizers of the fair, invited Diego Rivera
to participate. Rivera was commissioned to paint a giant fresco to be
installed in the new library building to be constructed on the grounds
of the San Francisco Junior College (now called City College of San
Francisco), of which Pflueger was the principle architect.

Rivera arrived in San Francisco in 1940, divorced from his
second wife, artist Frida Kahlo, and moved into artist Ralph
Stackpole's studio at 42 Calhoun Street on Telegraph Hill. During the
time Rivera was working on the Treasure Island fresco, Frida joined
him in San Francisco and the couple remarried.

Work on
the fresco began after the Rivera's sketches for the mural were
approved by the San Francisco Art Commission on July 25, 1940. The
mural was not completed by the closing of the Exposition on September
29, 1940. Rivera and his two assistants, Emmy Lou Packard and Arthur
Niendorff, continued to work for two months after the Fair closed in
the empty echoing exhibit space (which was really an airplane hangar)
using only a waffle iron for heat.

At the end of 1940, the public was again invited to Treasure Island,
this time to view Rivera's finished work. On Friday, November 30th, an
estimated five thousand people previewed the mural. A public viewing
of the mural was open on Sunday, December 2nd. An estimated 25-30,000
people crowded into the building to celebrate the masterpiece and to
mourn the end of the Exposition. The fresco was then packed into ten
crates and put into storage.

Pflueger's plans for the new
library building at City College had included a gallery space intended
as the permanent location for Rivera's mural. Pflueger died in 1946
and his library was never built. Rivera's politics made him the
frequent subject of controversy. That reputation, fueled by the
depiction of dictators in Panel 4 and the budget crunches of World War
II, kept the fresco in storage until after Rivera's death in
1957.

The mural panels were initially stored on Treasure
Island where one of them was partially damaged during a warehouse
fire. For a brief period, there was a plan to store them at the de
Young Museum, but the panels would have had to be lowered through a
skylight with the use of a crane and the cost was prohibitive. They
were eventually stored in a shed on the grounds of San Francisco
Junior College.

In 1957, Timothy Pflueger's brother,
Milton went to the San Francisco Unified School District Board with a
plan to keep the Rivera mural and have it installed in a City College
building. The construction documents for a new Theater had been
approved. Milton suggested that the drawing for the Lobby be modified
to accommodate the mural. In 1961, the ten panels were finally lined
up, welded together, and surrounded by a protective wall.

"The Rivera fresco, 22 feet high by 74 feet wide, was the keystone of Art in Action"

"In 1940, art on Treasure Island was taken down from its pedestal. The Fine Arts building was turned into an enormous studio where visitors could watch and talk to the creators of frescos, mosaics, paintings, sculpture, pottery, and textiles."